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Tuesday, July 21, 2015

Your fave memory from high school English class?

As I'm beginning to plan my syllabi for the upcoming year, I thought I'd ask you about your favorite memory from high school English. Maybe it was a book or a story. Maybe it was a project. Maybe it was a person. Would you share that memory with me? Who knows - maybe it will inspire me to look at my content in a new way. I'd really appreciate your input. :)

If you absolutely can't think of anything positive about that experience, then I'd also like to know what made it so terrible. Maybe I can avoid another kid feeling the same way...

For now, I'm off to work on my first quarter plan that I started yesterday.

10 comments:

Probably my most memorable project was when we had to write instructions. We had to write instructions on how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Then, our teacher followed the instructions, literally. "Put peanut butter on the bread" meant her shoving her hand into the jar of peanut butter and smearing it all over the place. It was pretty entertaining and looking back it had to have been influential for me because I ended up as a technical writer for a profession :) Clarity is important! That same teacher (now that I think about it, probably the best English teacher I had! ) was always coming up with projects for us to do, a lot which were acting out parts of the books we were reading (such as Taming of the Shrew). I felt like that brought the literature to life, whereas just reading and talking about the books was a bit of a yawn.

Wow....I first have to say that I loved Carrie's comment. The certainly would have been a memorable lesson for me as well.

That said, I despised English. *gasp* Sorry. I wasn't "into" literature and grammar has always been my weakest point. I was a science girl all of the way eventually getting an MS degree. I can write a scientific paper like it's nobody's business but write a resume or book report? ack! As an adult I have come to love reading and am trying my best to instill the love into my 14 year old daughter who, like me, despises reading/grammar. She sees reading as a chore, no matter the subject matter. :-(

Although I didn't love reading the "good" literature: The Great Gatsby, 1984, Shakespeare, To Kill a Mockingbird, etc., that's what I remember the most. Lately, I've been noticing so many grammar issues on social media! Please spend a day teaching the difference between your and you're and all the other infractions that you see. I'd suggest an assignment for students to find 20 grammar errors in social media posts or comments and rewrite them correctly. These errors make kids (and many adults) look uneducated! "Your my best friend" Really?

Okay, we're going way back here ('69 - '73). I remember having a creative writing assignment; we had to pick a piece of music and write a story inspired by it. I chose "In A Gadda Da Vida" by Iron Butterfly; my story involved rival beings in a fantasy world - cue influence by "The Lord of the Rings" which I read around the same time. I got a 10/10 for my story, but in typical fashion I'd turned it in a couple days late, so my final mark was 8/10. I've still got the paper - probably 8-10 hand-written pages on 3-holed, lined paper - complete with my mark in red at the top. Thanks for the memory Tiffany - I just listened to "In A Gadda Da Vida" on YouTube while I typed this, LOL.Keitha

I didn't have any outstanding English teachers, but I loved reading so much that I wanted to become one anyway. One of my favorite teachers was a speech teacher, who gave positive critiques of our speeches in a way that made us feel we had unique ideas to contribute to the world. Another was a social studies teacher who helped us understand what was going on in the 60s. and said something very wise that I still think about today when I am tempted to argue with what seems to be a stupid view: "You will never argue people out of what they haven't been argue into," My best English teachers were in college. One in particular--he made language study fascinating by teaching about all the different approaches to it, including transformational grammar. He also taught a great literature class. Once he broke us up into small groups and gave each group a different short story to study and write questions about. Then he met with each small group separately and was so enthusiastic about our ideas that it confirmed my desire to be and English teacher. Another teacher brought us outside in early spring to look at the trees and discuss Frost's poem "Nothing Gold Can Stay."

Well it certainly is not a favorite high school English class memory, but it is unfortunately the one I remember most. . I was called out by the teacher to "read the next paragraph aloud" and of course I wasn't paying attention. Mind you in addition to not paying attention, reading aloud was my absolute worst thing to do in any class because I had (well, still do) what I would call social anxiety. Well, let's just say I mispronounced the word "tidy". As the teacher politely corrected my mispronunciation, the class laughed hysterically.

I took AP English and my sophomore & senior teachers were fabulous. One thing that stuck with me from sophomore year was a challenge to find references to literature in our everyday culture. For instance, I remember President Bush giving a state of the Union address & talking about, "Our once and future nation," a reference to Malory's tales of King Arthur. Senior year, we had to diagram the preamble to the Constitution. It was crazy hard, but I'm a nerd who loved the challenge and I was super proud to complete it. I still diagram sentences in my head 20+ years later.

2 things- the first day, and the teacher scaring us all to death yelling at some of the boys, and the shakespeare project we did in the spring. It was probably because it was so close to scrapbooking that I loved it, but we had to find 20 examples of references to shakespeare in everyday life, and do illustrations. I drew pictures to go with the quotes, and mounted them on colored paper, and my teacher loved my project. It was AP English for a college credit my senior year, and honestly, thinking back on it, it was one of my favorite projects that I can remember doing in high school.

I loved grammer and even thought about being an English teacher some day, but that meant I would have had to teach literature too, and that wasn't my favorite. I also loved to diagram sentences, and I don't think they do that anymore. But it really helped define the usage of words.